


keep your eyes on me

by Trell (orphan_account)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Dressrosa Arc, Gen, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 11:38:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5538461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It hits him at the worst possible moment. (Again. Ace never did have very good timing.)</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep your eyes on me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [one piece ficathon](http://onepiece-ficathon.dreamwidth.org/1041.html). The prompt was, "sabo/ace (platonic), _keep your eyes on me_."

Sabo's memories come back in pieces. 

It’s like reading about Ace’s death brought back the pathways but not the landmarks along them; the sense of things he ought to know but not the individual details.

Those come in intervals, at random, triggered by the most inconsequential of things. A bowl of soup, a tree branch twisted in a particular way, the smell of the sea after days spent inland; a seagull, crying out as it wheels overhead. Little things all, they dredge the haze of his past and make him remember, unravel the memories the explosion had tangled up in his brain.

He tries to write them down right away when he can. (He remembers now that he’d always meant to write a book about his travels, when he still believed he’d be a pirate and not a soldier; and it’s a cruel sort of humor, Sabo thinks, that now that he’s sailing the sea just like he’d wanted, now that he’s got the quill in his fingers and the sailor’s callouses on his hands, all he wants to write about is _home._ The freed bird, singing of its cage instead of the sky.) 

There isn’t always a chance to do it, of course. Sometimes the memories wash over him in the middle of a battle or a negotiation or a storm, and those times he can only swallow them, focus on the present and hope the details won’t leave him by the time he can put pen to paper. Mostly they don’t; sometimes they do, and that hurts, because each of them only happens once, resurfacing like air from underwater, no way to pull them back down.

By the time he reaches Dressrosa he’s got two journals filled in his quick, meticulous hand, ink poorly blotted on those pages where the memories hadn’t been kind, sketches of the faces he remembers on the pages in between. And he hopes against hope that taking in Ace’s fire will mean something: because if it was Ace that brought his memories crashing back into him after Marineford, if it was Ace that reached out to him, then surely this part of him ought to bring something, too. Flames to burn away the mind’s darkness. 

Get the devil's fruit, get the rest of his memories. Nothing’s so simple, of course.

*

It hits him at the worst possible moment. (Again. Ace never did have very good timing.)

The arena cracks below his fist and there’s the tremendous, thunderous crash as it shatters, water spraying up from the former moat, steam bursting through the fissures, and he’s got to seize the devil’s fruit and get out of here and get on with it and find Luffy again—

The memory opens in his mind in screaming color, touched off by the spray of water present now as it had been then. Ace’s young voice echoes in the space between his ears, his own voice ringing in the background, _Keep your eyes on me._

Sabo misses a step. It’s enough to plunge him downward, steam and water and screaming buffeting him from all sides as he falls. 

The memory rises up to meet him.

*

_He doesn’t know the name of the boy on the log that lies across the ravine._

_Never even seen him before, in fact, and that’s strange, because Sabo was sure he’d met all the kids living in the Terminal by now; there’s not much to do when you live in a trash heap, so they all hang out together, roam its reeking footpaths in ragtag gangs. (Sabo used to tag along, too, before he figured out that the way to really make it in the garbage dump was to steal from the big guys passing through; now he mostly keeps to himself and watches for good catches.)_

_This boy he’s never seen at all, and he’s got a look Sabo thinks he would’ve remembered; freckles all over his face and his arms, a makeshift staff strapped to his back, and an expression fierce as tigers._

_That might be because of the situation, though._

_Just now the boy on the log is standing atop it, clinging to a protruding branch not quite at the ravine’s middle. There’s a sheer drop and a roaring river below him, the spray of the nearby waterfall reaching them both. If he falls Sabo knows there’s no way he’ll survive; he’s thrown enough stones into the ravine to know exactly how many jagged outcroppings the boy would hit on the way down._

_“Hey!” Sabo calls, decided at last. “Hey, do you want me to help you?”_

_The boy startles—Sabo jolts instinctively forward from where he is behind the log’s roots—but doesn’t fall, only scowls at him and yells back, “No! Fuck off!”_

_Sabo frowns. “You wanna die on there?”_

_“So what if I do,” spits back the boy on the log, and keeps clinging to the branch for dear life. As Sabo watches he tries to take a step forward, glances down and jerks back, hands not letting go of his safety._

_“You can’t get across if you’re gonna look down,” Sabo says. He knows; he’d snuck out on enough rooftops back home to have had it happen to him. The precarious ledge and the possible fall that made his head spin just to think about, and he hadn’t made it past until he’d leaned against the adjacent wall and closed his eyes to scoot across—_

_“Shut up!” says the boy, “Shut up, I’ll make it on my own.”_

_“If you say so,” says Sabo, and picks up the pipe he uses to rifle the trash heaps (and fight off the giant rats that live in the gutters) from where he’s leaned it against a nearby tree. “I’m leaving, then!”_

_“No, wait—!” cries the boy on the log._

_Sabo can’t help but grin. “You wanna get off after all?”_

_“So’s I can punch that stupid smug look off your face,” the boy tells him. “How’re you gonna help me from all the way over there, anyway?”_

_“You just have to keep your eyes on me and keep going. If you make it far enough I’ll grab your hand,” Sabo tells him._

_“Keep my eyes on you,” the boy says dubiously. “Looking at your ugly mug’s s’posed to_ help?”

_And Sabo, struck by genius, sticks out his tongue and says, “Says the uglier mug. Bet you wouldn’t be able to beat me if you got over here, anyway.”_

This _gets a response. The boy looks furious; and like that alone is enough, like that’s all he needs to get his limbs moving, he lets go of the branch and starts off across the log, arms out to both sides, glowering at Sabo all the while. “I’m gonna kick your ass!” he promises._

_“Keep your eyes on me,” repeats Sabo, and climbs forward over the log’s roots, gets as far onto it as he can while still holding on to stick out his hand. “And no way. I’m gonna kick yours.”_

_It takes maybe a minute more for the boy to make it to the end of the log, glaring straight at him. Sabo grabs his hand, hard, and pulls him forward and onto solid ground; the boy looks down at last and stamps repeatedly once he’s there, like he’s trying to reassure himself that he’s made it. “What’s your name?” asks Sabo, “Before you start trying to kill me for not leaving you to die.”_

_“Ace,” says the boy, and looks up at him one more time, close enough now that Sabo gets to experience the full brunt of his fiery gaze. “My name’s Ace. Why wouldn't you want me to die?”_

_“Hi, Ace,” says Sabo, “Mine's Sabo. And—'cause. Besides, you said you were gonna kick my ass, right? Belike I gotta show you I don't go down easy.”_

_It’s the first time he ever sees Ace's smile._

*

Sabo snaps back to reality mere moments before hitting the ground, comes to his senses and tears straight through from memory to instinct. Just barely manages to land in a way that doesn’t break his spine, twists and only gets shocking hot bruises all along his side for his trouble. _Ace,_ he thinks, _Ace—_

The memory of the first time they’d met, here and now, when Ace’s devil fruit is almost in his hands; and maybe it means something and maybe it doesn’t, but Sabo has always preferred to believe. He scrambles up from where he’s fallen, jumps and climbs across the rubble. Knows that it’s now or never, while the steam and the audience’s screaming have everyone confused, have everyone looking elsewhere.

The monstrous fish with the prize on its back leaps from the water before him, just where he’d predicted it would; and he throws himself forward, manages to grab hold of the chest with the devil fruit in it, slams into it with his torso and bruises his ribs in the process. Gets to prying it open with haki-blackened hands, _almost there, almost there, almost there._

Light spills through as soon as the boards of the chest snap open, and there it is, right before him: Ace’s fire, Ace’s heart, the only thing left of him still on this earth. Sabo pulls it out with as much reverence as the moment allows, which is little, and it’s hot in his hand, nearly too hot to hold. 

Wherever the rest of Ace is, Sabo hopes that he’s watching. 

_Keep your eyes on me,_ he thinks, and sinks his teeth in.


End file.
